Bart D. Ehrman

JESUS, INTERRUPTED

Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't
Know About Them)

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
Ehrman is writing here mainly for Christians who believe in the divine
inspiration of the New Testament, to show that it is a very human
document, with abundant contradictory views of who Jesus was and what
his life and teaching meant. This has been the standard view of scholars
for the last two hundred years but it has not reached many people who
attend church on Sundays, and even clergy who have learned these facts
in their studies don't take them into account when preaching.

The book covers much the same ground as does earlier books by the same
author. Jesus is presented as an apocalyptic Jewish prophet, whose
message cannot be properly understood outside the context in which he
lived and taught. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book, at
least for those who have read Ehrman's previous books, is his
penultimate chapter, entitled 'Who Invented Christianity?'. The usual
answer given to this question is 'St Paul', but Ehrman finds that Paul
is only part of the story.

Jesus preached only to the Jews, but some early Christians universalised
his message to make Christianity a world religion. They transformed the
Jewish Messiah into a suffering figure who died for our sins. They gave
Christianity an anti-Jewish character, with appalling results in the
later history of the West. They made Jesus into a divine figure, one
member of the Trinity. And they transformed the belief in a general
apocalyptic resurrection of the faithful into a teaching about the
immortality of the soul and the idea that when we die we are immediately
translated to heaven or hell. All these developments came about over a
long period spanning many years, indeed several centuries. Paul was not
wholly or even mainly responsible for this sequence of events; many
other early Christians, mostly unknown to us, played their part.

In his final chapter Ehrman injects a personal note to explain what all
this has meant for him. He has moved from being an evangelical Christian
to becoming an agnostic, but not, he says, because of his researches in
the New Testament. Plenty of convinced Christians are familiar with
these facts and are able to retain their faith, and Ehrman finds
this to be perfectly reasonable. What caused his own faith to ebb away was
his inability to reconcile the notion of the Christian God with the
existence of human suffering.